Playing Along to What? Video Game Music and the Metaphor Model

Abstract

What does it mean to ‘play along’ with video game music? Over the past few years, scholars such as Andrew Schartmann, Kiri Miller, and William Cheng have given accounts of instances in which players experience themselves performing actions ‘to’ a game’s music. But these moments are not pervasive in games. Unlike the ‘kinesonic synchresis’ of sound effects and player action that Karen Collins points out, music’s ‘kinesonic synchronization’ is perhaps less dictated by the temporal coincidence of audiovisual events and more by what Nicholas Cook calls the ‘enabling similarity’ between music and image in his Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998). Enabling similarity lies at the basis of Cook’s metaphor model of musical multimedia, in which music and (usually) moving images relate to each other and create new meanings like the two terms in a metaphor. In this chapter, I trace out the implications of moving from this non-interactive music-image model to an interactive music-action model suited to the playful engagement with game music. Taking as a case study the soundtrack of Super Mario Bros. (1985), I move to a deeper understanding of both the embodied aspects of the metaphor model, and of ludo-musical experiences in video games.